Webmasters, Own Your Site!

The Alexa help forums have been great for letting webmasters provide us with ideas for new services, as well as ways to improve existing ones. One such user-driven improvement is in the way webmasters interact with their Alexa data, including easy to use tools for editing your site's contact information and the ability for webmasters to respond directly to reviews of their site. In addition to being an engineer at Alexa I am also the webmaster of a small, personal site, and now like webmasters everywhere I can now take control of my site's information on Alexa and "Own My Site."

Edit Your Site Data

Editing the contact information for your site on Alexa has never been easier. Either starting from the "Contact Info" tab on your site's Site Information page, or on the "For Site Owners" tab near the top of the page, select the Self-service tools. You will be prompted to log, and you can use either an Alexa or your Facebook account. There is no advantage to having one type of account over another, use whichever is more convenient.

Once you have chosen the site you want to edit, you will need to verify that you are authorized to do so. You can become authorized either by adding a file to the root directory of your site, or adding a meta tag to your homepage. The methods work equally well, the former is a good choice if you have direct access to your web hosting, the latter if you do not. Once verified, editing your information is a simple as filling out and submitting a form. Easy! Your changes will appear on the Alexa website within 48 hours.

But what if takes divine intervention to get your company's homepage edited? Or what if you no longer own a website, and you want to remove your contact information completely? These situations do come up, so we offer a "manual verification" process to have an Alexa content editor change your information for you. As you might imagine this process is slow, up to 2 weeks, and you will have to go through the process again if you want to make more changes. So we highly recommend you use the automated system.

Respond to Reviews

Once you verify that you are authorized to edit a site, you will also be able to respond to reviews people have written about it. If you are logged in, any review for a site for which you are authorized will give you the option to "respond." You can respond once to each review, and responses fall under the same review guidelines the reviews themselves. Responses to reviews are attributed to the site, not your login, so your personal information remains that way. If you think a review was unfair, or want to clarify something, or even just want to thank the reviewer, you now can.

The Future

These are just a few of the improvements we have planned to allow you to own your content on Alexa. If you have ideas that you would like to share, please visit our help forums and share! We're listening.